Rebecca Adlington, Kerry Katona, Susan Boyle and the Queen can all breathe sighs of relief. Frankie Boyle (no relation to Susan) has a new target: publishers. The Glaswegian comedian has attacked them for creating a degraded books market teeming with celebrity memoirs – which may seem a bit rich given that he's just written one of his own.

"I never really followed publishing until I wrote this book," said Boyle over coffee in the bar of his posh hotel in Covent Garden, "but what strikes me is there aren't many publishers you'd confuse with leading philosophical thinkers of the day.

"Right now if you read the Bookseller there are publishers moaning about how terrible celebrity biographies now are. How they're all badly written and say nothing. It's a fair point, but don't they realise that they're responsible for creating this toxic gene? They're the ones who have been putting out any old crap – and now they're complaining?

"Maybe if they came up with better ideas for books or they told some celebrities who want to write their memoirs to fuck off now and again, I might have more respect for their argument."

He added: "Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying publishers are all evolutionary blips who deserve to become extinct." And then he trailed off mid-sentence.

This is an intriguing analysis because Boyle has spent more than four months this year writing a book in the toxic sub-genre he indicts. Boyle's My Shit Life So Far has sold 107,000 copies in hardback since it was published in October and received overwhelmingly enthusiastic reviews. The book is proving a surprise bestseller at a time when retailers, critics and readers are berating publishers for printing memoirs by celebrities you've never heard of or autobiographies by stars who seem to have published their life stories only five minutes earlier.

Among the most derided offerings this Christmas are Peter Kay's 272-page Saturday Night Peter, which follows his 2006 autobiographical bestseller The Sound of Laughter, and Sheryl Gascoigne's Stronger: My Life Surviving Gazza.

How then does Boyle, the shock jock from BBC2's Mock the Week who sent the Daily Mail and Newsnight into conniptions with his impersonation of the Queen ("My pussy is so old that it's haunted"), justify his foray into a genre he despises? "I can't. I was writing a column for the Daily Record [he quit when they declined to publish a piece suggesting that the recently deceased Michael Jackson was a paedophile] and I found it quite easy. I thought if I can write 1,500 words of jokes like that in a day then I could write a book of jokes with my life loosely threaded through them."

When asked about the literary merit of his book, Boyle replied: "I think the most important things my book does is to give readers the address of George Monbiot's website and how to get hold of comic books by Grant Morrison." He said the best celebrity memoir he ever read was Clive James's Unreliable Memoirs. "But that was proper literature. This isn't."

Boyle, 37, conceded the relative youth of those who overwhelmingly write celebrity autobiographies today further undermines the genre's credibility. "A few years ago there was a fuss when Ian Botham's biography came out and people said 'But he's only 12'. Now nearly everybody's ridiculously young when they write their memoirs. It is wrong. I remember reading Paul O'Grady's book and thinking this is proper autobiography, with lots of detail and history. Not that much has happened to me."

Boyle's book begins: "I don't think anyone can have written an autobiography without at some point thinking, 'Why would anyone want to know this shit?'" Despite this, the book occasionally veers from telling jokes into passages that describe his upbringing in the Pollokshaws district of Glasgow and detail his alcohol, LSD, sexual and mushroom experiences. "I'm clean now," he said of his lurid past. "I've been stabilised into blank antipathy."

Why is your book a success? "Because I worked hard at the jokes. That's what I do in my stand-up. I work hard and hone the material and after a while audiences expect what I do to be good. And I did the same thing with this book."

Is Boyle utterly cynical about the book he's produced? "I'm not cynical at all." Boyle, who considers himself a devotee of Noam Chomsky's politics, "only more leftwing than that", said that when he started writing a column for the Sun recently, he was buoyed by thoughts of one of the paper's ex-columnists, former London mayor Ken Livingstone. "It's that Marx thing: you make history in conditions not of your own choosing. And the point is not just to write to the converted. It's about getting to the audience that doesn't agree with you rather than preaching to the converted."

Will he write a sequel? "I wouldn't have thought there'll be one. Not after all the disparaging stuff I've said about my publishers."

But, given his first book's success, he may well be wrong.

Best-selling celebrity memoirs this week

Seemingly ageless and vexingly perky Geordie TV presenters trace their joint life story from Byker Grove to the Australian jungle in this ghosted memoir critically damned as "affable" and "bland" – and chiefly enlivened by the passage in which Jordan pursues Dec. Although, like the rest of us, she may not have known which was which: she may have been after Ant.

2 My Shit Life So Far by Frankie Boyle (HarperCollins, £18.99) 30,700

Bile-filled, foul-mouthed, misanthropic, hilariously unpleasant about anyone who's put their head above the parapet of celebrity – what's not to like? The key problem with Boyle's memoir of his first 37 years is the sense that telling his life story gets in the way of what he'd rather be doing, ie telling rude jokes.

3 Saturday Night Peter by Peter Kay (Century, £20) 26,873

This follow-up to the Bolton standup's bestselling The Sound of Laughter from Christmas 2006 tells the calamitously diluted story of his first years on tour. By the end of the book he's only 30, so we can expect more, though even his most ardent fans might yearn for less.

4 It's Not What You Think by Chris Evans (HarperCollins, £20) 21,709

It certainly isn't: it's a critic-confounding mea culpa of a memoir from Britain's one-time most arrogant DJ. The chastened fortysomething, who takes over Terry Wogan's Radio 2 breakfast slippers next month, reflects on the stranger that is his ego-bloated former self and prepares us for volume two, in which he marries that nice Billie Piper.